 Hello and welcome to News Clicks special coverage of Budget 2022 and today I have Professor Vikas Raoval and I have Deepa Sena and yesterday we focused on the larger issues or let me say the macro issues that were part of the budget whether there's been excess spending or whether there is enough spending what is happening in terms of capital expenditure but today we want to look at two things which are important which affect our economy and we want to see whether the budget tackles that at all and you know that in India we've had these long almost one year long farmers protests against those three farm bills which had come in which was broadly trying to hand over the farm sector to big companies that is what was going to happen there and farmers protested against that they said that we want a minimum support price and the government actually said that although they're not going to put it in the bill itself but minimum support price is not going to go so farmers have they got anything because remember that the prime minister withdrew those farm bills and effectively said that he could not make farmers understand that these farm bills were good for them and the government was never going to go with go back from its commitment to giving farmers a basic support so what does the budget do there and another thing that when we look at unemployment we tend to forget that in India the biggest victims of unemployment are actually women because they have probably they have a higher unemployment rate and yet they virtually don't come to look for jobs paid jobs they don't even turn up to look for paid jobs because they've completely given up hope so India is one of the worst women's labour participation rate and it has a very very poor employment rate even amongst those who come looking for jobs so I'm going to focus today on these two things and I'm going to start with food and farmers so let me go to Deepa Sinha first you Deepa work on food security and then I'm going to come to Professor Ravel on specifically on what is happening in terms of MSP so let me start with this first thing when we look at the food subsidy right we look at food subsidy in terms of what the government wanted to spend in 21-22 they I think ended up spending four times a part of that might have gone to retired FCI's debt but even in terms of spending it seems to be more than what they had budgeted for and this time they've curtailed that drastically what is in your opinion the impact on let's say food security or in terms of giving food cheap food to people or subsidized food to people should we go by the budget estimate or is the budget estimate deliberately kept low to show a lower fiscal deficit lower spending? Anindu I think it's a bit of both the budget estimate also tells us some bit on the intent of what the government aims to do this year for food security which we can kind of triangulate with everything else they have been saying so like you said two years back the food subsidy was really high and most of it in fact more than half of it is paying all loans and that I think was using the opportunity of COVID where you could you had more fiscal space to kind of do away with the things that you had done in the past this year the allocation which is about 80,000 crores less than the revised estimate for 21-22 if you look at that figure of about 2.06 lakhs which is the food subsidy estimate this year that's just about enough to meet the commitments under the National Food Security Act which is something they have to continue doing as long as the act is in place unless they amend that the additional amount is what has been given in different phases under the Pradhan Mantri, Gareeb Kalyan and Anu Yojana as additional free grain as COVID relief and that was after the second wave announced till December and in December they said they would extend it till March which was clearly aimed at the elections but now that the third wave has come and pandemic has not ended we do need that to continue but if you look at the budget figures it seems like they'll probably after March not continue this additional free grain which is COVID relief I think that is what is going to be hit and all the field surveys are showing that those who have ration cards this additional grain is really what is keeping them from starvation because jobs have been lost people don't have money they are not eating tar and vegetables and many other things but basic food grain is being met because of this grain that has been given. Right so let me move from there straight to the issue of farmers because you mentioned that loss of jobs right loss of jobs and from the data that we've seen coming out of CMI for the last several years in fact even before COVID came from the middle of 2018-19 you've seen a transfer of people people moving from non-farm sector back to farm right and as a lot of people have argued that this is essentially a form of disguised unemployment even though in terms of unemployment figures it appears that there are a lot of people getting work in agriculture effectively they've lost work elsewhere they've gone to agriculture and we've seen that happen throughout the COVID period yet if we look at the farm sector now that so many more people are dependent on it there is nothing in the budget that either speaks for farmers and virtually there is no there doesn't seem to be any allocation for even something like MSP. How do you see that? I think there are two three points that I want to make one I mean broadly the first thing is that this is a seriously anti-farmer budget I mean after what has happened over the last year year and a half you know to present a budget like this in which there's something like 26% cut in in the funds allocated for agriculture you know over one lakh crores have been cut you know one is talking of a budget that's like seriously anti-farmer that's one the second thing is that we need to understand what has happened in the agricultural economy you see you are in food economy you know taking from the point that Deepa just made you see we are a country that sit where the government is sitting on over 100 million tons of food grain you see between 2020 and now over this period of pandemic government had hoarded an additional 20 million tons of grain I mean there was a time a couple of months back when our food stocks hit 120 million tons okay this is the record high for India's history this is the highest food stocks by any agency in the world this is the highest food stocks by of any country in the world and we are doing this at a time of such crisis this is a this is incredible I mean no I mean it shows how anti people this government has become that you are sitting on mountains of grain and you have not even not distributing it you're not distributing it you're accumulating more and you I mean you could have run a massive food for work program with this this great you could have said we are going to double employment creation under NREGA by paying 50% of wages as grain in grain all kinds of things with so much grain you had okay you don't do anything you were just sitting on it now by sitting on that grain one thing you're doing is that you've cut the food subsidy expenditure but the bulk of what is being spent on food subsidy is actually being spent on just maintaining that grain it's storage and warehousing where you're spending bulk of your food subsidy now you know okay that is an important point for our viewers to understand that even where the food subsidy is being shown you're saying a large part of it is simply maintaining what you're storing and it's not actually the cost of distributing free food to people it's simply the cost of storing if government today gives that grain away for free it would be saving money it would be saving money because you are actually spending money on holding it okay so government's food subsidy bill would actually fall if you decided that you know 50 million tons or 60 million tons you are just going to give away for free okay now in addition to this it creates another peculiar problem you see wheat and rice I'm going to interrupt you there just just for our viewers if you could give us an estimate so if let's say 100 rupees is the food subsidy bill how much of it is actually just being spent on a rough figure would do how much of it is just being spent to maintain and store things just an administrative kind of thing I have not done that calculation recently but my estimated would be like 70 percent 70 percent 70 out of 100 rupees is just being held the grains just being held the grain something distributed of what you are procuring if you're going to hold bulk of it and that's an accumulated that stock's accumulating you see so you are distributing what I don't know 30 million tons and you're holding 100 million tons I think so you are you're actually stocking and you're not letting it go you are adding on to that stock so it's it's cumulative so there's huge amount of money being spent just on holding it now in addition to this what it does is and this is you know with wheat and rice are the most important crops they're most important crop to farmers they're most important crop to consumers you see by holding this grain you see what you are doing is you're actually depressing open market prices the wholesale prices the traders don't buy wheat and rice you know so the farmers are where government procurement does not happen farmers are having to get to distress sales because because no traders willing to buy rice and wheat because government is sitting on 100 million tons so that this has meant that if the government did release 100 million tons or let's say 70 million tons won't that also have a impact on prices by depressing them because won't there be a huge supply of food grain in the market which will then depress prices in general if you had done it systematically throughout you wouldn't have reached this point at all you see now you can do all kinds of things you can actually say instead of distributing just rice we are going to start distributing chana and tour in pds and do procurement of those crops you see what government said that we will procure chana we will procure arhar we will procure moon and we will procure all kinds of other things particularly pulses and we will distribute along with five kilos of rice and wheat we will give one kilo of dal to everybody yes you create incredible benefits nutrition farmers you know profits to farmers you will save on water if in a sense and an incentive to produce pulses we end up importing exactly so the point is that if you had the intent to actually change agriculture develop agriculture you need to create that incentive structure which would on one hand provide incentive to farmers to produce what the country needs and on the other hand create a way by which that what is produced by farmers reaches consumers at affordable prices now right now you are in a situation where the entire thing is broken it's broken for farmers it's broken for consumers you have hunger you have the highest hunger in the world highest prevalence of hunger in the world and you have farmers committing just sitting on food grain stock you're sitting on mountains of food grain stock so that's the situation right now Deepa I just want to quickly bring in we can keep going back to this topic as well but I just want to bring in and in a sense it is connected the fact that women's employment is so low in India and you know there was a time when it was argued that as affluences increasing because of social reasons women are coming out of the paid workspace and going back into the homestead they're not going out to work anymore but if that were true then one would see that women's employment rate should have been higher the unemployment rate should have been lower because there's certain things in which women work so why on the other hand we actually see that the unemployment rate for women is actually much higher than what it is for men and in a sense that if you look at it the more distress we find in at the lower end of the population amongst the poorer lot the less likely it is for women to be able to go out and work because the more they you know the entire some of the worker women's work also involves opening up space for someone else to come and do the work and that is true especially in lower income groups the lower middle classes where if a woman has to go out to work they also need someone else to come and do certain kinds of work in the house or look after the children instead and that's a kind of a double whammy right because not only do women not are not able to go out to work but even a large part of women's employment which is domestic work or personal services which they provide non-professional domestic head the work of a domestic help even that is going away because families can't afford to hire domestic help anymore so they're going back to the village and we are seeing this vicious cycle take place continuously which is in a certain sense tied to the entire idea of increasing poverty increasing rural distress so what has the budget done and has the budget even cared about this at all? So the budget really doesn't seem to have cared about employment at all overall not just women's employment but overall employment as well is a problem in the country and we have to understand women's employment in that context of fewer and fewer jobs being created outside of agriculture and what you were also earlier saying that this return to agriculture's move of distress as well because there are no jobs available elsewhere. Given that context there is also this other thing that you have discussed that for many years now we are seeing a decline in women's workforce participation and that there is enough research now to show that that's that cannot be blamed on cultural reasons that very much has to do with this fact that again the jobs are not available that there were very few jobs being created in the economy and the first jobs that are created and the best better quality jobs that are created are usually captured by men they are seen as the breadwinners so if the man and the woman doesn't have a job even for the household it's a priority that the man first finds the job. Along with this women have other constraints again like you said that they have I mean all the surveys also show that women say that they're willing to work but they're willing to work more if the timings are flexible or the place of work is close to more and these preferences are usually because other social services are not available and the burden of the household work falls on women so we can look at many things in the budget also which actually increases this burden of household work and unpaid work on women for example direct programs like creches and maternity entitlements over the last four five years you're seeing that the budgets for these schemes have been actually reducing even in nominal terms. Budgets for school and day meals angan vadis these are things where if a child is getting a full nutritious meal in school if the child is staying in school for eight hours that reduces the woman's burden of work at home budgets for these have remained again in real terms have gone down in nominal terms it's the same sort of number where the name has changed name has changed yes the good thing is that they've changed the name very respectable name it's called be in portion it was served here called midday mid-day but the allocation is exactly the same and therefore if you adjust for inflation it's actually going down actually going down and it's not even taking into account the factor for two years children have not gone to school and children's families have been facing this kind of economic crisis so they have a learning loss to catch up on they have a nutrition loss to catch up on so if anything you would add a breakfast you would add an egg in that meal now the children are coming back you see that those budgets are not increased budget for LPG cylinders again that has a huge burden on women if you look at the dbt for LPG they're giving new connections but they're not giving the dbt the subsidy so cylinders have become so expensive people have a connection but they're still using it reduce the subsidy even at a time when fuel prices prices are going up so again that means women's time is now going back in collecting firewood and preparing the cow which is the time they could have used for gainful employment so there are all these indirect ways through which the budget because it does not make sufficient allocations is increasing the burden of unpaid care work on women because of which they are not able to participate in the labour market when they do there are no jobs for them also one other last point I want to make which is again related to budget and women's employment is that one area where the government can directly create good quality jobs for women and their very critical jobs are your frontline workers asha zanganwadi workers helpers these are exclusive women carders all of them put together come to over 60 70 lakh women who are already employed they have been working through the pandemic and none of them are recognized as workers they don't get a salary they get an order or they get an incentive which often is not even as much as minimum wages so on the one side we are talking about women's contribution to the economy and providing decent employment and on the other the government itself is employing women where it's saying they're not employing women women are being volunteered for the government it shows the whole authority of the situation and even as we speak about the workers and asha's are on strike in different parts of the country and the budget makes no mention of them does not allocate any budgets to increase their pay which has been again stagnant for many years I think they are one of the problems that the poor of India face is that there are no elections coming this year after you know in the next fiscal year virtually nothing except I think Gujarat you know those are already covered in the previous budget and they're probably going to spend much more in the run up because they didn't spend till November December so it will be spent in these and probably is already being spent in UP as we are hearing reports but the question that you know both what both of you are saying is interesting because all the solutions that you're talking about actually don't require any money I mean at least not significant amount of money because if you look at distributing food which is already lying there there is a system of distribution available and effectively you can't even say I don't have money to give you because you're giving money to store food but you're not distributing it effectively as you said that the cost actually would reduce open up more fiscal space to do other things but it's not being done so in a sense are even those who are heterodox economists left economists do they tend to miss the you know tree wood for the trees when they talk about fiscal spending not taking place because there are these solutions which can actually save a significant amount of money no I think no I think that's not the point the point is one is that yes there is a there is a possibility of prioritization that you prioritize people's welfare over corporate profits okay yes but that is not to say that there is not a need for there was not a need in this budget to expand spending to create consumer demand of course there was there was that was the most critical and an important thing to do you see there are also other things where there actually money is required and it's not just money you see look at fertilizers okay it's a very interesting case you see over the last one one and a half year there's been a huge crisis because government has done nothing to ensure supply of fertilizers over the last 10 years India's domestic capacity for production of fertilizer has been seriously compromised in the domestic space it's increasingly privatized so public sector is is less has a smaller and declining share private sector is more and we have become more and more import dependent during the pandemic there has been a huge disruption in global supply of fertilizers and we don't have public sector with the same capacity to actually plan and secure supplies of either raw material or produce fertilizers which has meant a huge crisis in the fertilizer sector government has been made forced to increase fertilizer subsidy but this year they've again cut it they've again cut it so that kind of brings me back to a question that I posed right at the beginning and I'm not realizing that the structural problems that are there which are causing fertilizer prices globally to rise are not going to go away very easily or very soon so next year that brings me back to a question because you know even as a person who you know as a layperson not an economist someone who just reads up a bit I understand that fertilizer prices are not going to go down so I find it very difficult to believe that the finance ministry with its entire team of people who monitor these things globally have research people data that they don't know it so it kind of brings me back to the original question that we seem to have seen regularly with this government that it announces less on certain things probably to make international finance capital happy that they're not spending on subsidies but they spend more than they actually announced repeatedly they keep doing that well on some things they spend more because there's pressure on other things this is so you know you don't spend on children you don't spend on things that you spend on some other things where which are you know politically high decibel so the two things as far as welfare is concerned where they said something and spent more is NREGA and PDS both of which given the situation was completely unavoidable they should have done even more than what they did but you know if I have to compare that with what UPA did when there was a huge demand for NREGA you remember in 2011-12 after that they reduced it so UPA consistently reduced its NREGA outlay and in fact they spent I mean if you remember there was a outlay of 40,100 crore if I remember correctly in 2010-11 but all that was spent was I think 28,000-29,000 crore so even when there was demand the UPA wasn't spending and there would be backlog I'm saying that there seems to be a political calculation here that subsidies do get you votes and therefore you need to spend it you need to spend on the poorest which keeps them at a subsistence level don't bother about employment you can't create that employment you need to keep the richest lot happy because they give you the money but you also need votes from the poorest so subsidies have to be given but you can't announce them so I'm just looking at you know the fact that there seems to be no allocation for MSP there seems to be you know 80,000 crore was announced for fertilizers they spent 1.4 lakh crore right so it almost seems to me that it is known that you'll end up spending some 1 lakh crore or half a percent of GDP more on these things by the end of the year but no point in announcing it right at the beginning Aninder I would not see it like that if it was the case that you were the subsidies would get you votes then you would announce it the point is that you don't announce it you don't want do it you don't want to give them you give them because you don't have a choice it's only under huge public pressure that but you know who in the village who which poor person in the village even knows that a budget is coming out or even watches it or understands it so you don't have to announce it in the budget you basically do it on a hoarding later on or when you go to campaign that I gave you so much free food all right and you do it through state governments vjp state governments you've seen that happen repeatedly the campaign goes you see I mean if you announce something big there are hoardings everywhere and there's campaign on the TV that you know Mr. Modi is doing this that and so on so I mean it does reach people so it's not like when they make big ticket announcements they don't encash it when they announce that they're going to have a PM Kisan they get votes so yes of course yeah absolutely so you know when they want to spend to get votes they make big announcements and they spend it to get votes when they are actually announcing that we don't care we are not going to give you money but is that the case again if I look at Mandrega for instance Mandrega allocation if I look at it under the NDA Mandrega allocation has actually been much much higher even if you're just for inflation than the UPA which came up with the with the scheme itself if you look at even food subsidy food subsidy bill has actually not gone up sharply during covid actually it did not because a part of it was just things which you were paying fci for right that subsidy existed fci was simply not being paid through the budget it was being asked to take a loan and at one go you got rid of that using covid as a cover so I'm saying that there seems to be a very clear policy decision to not announce and things which do not reach people like the budget which actually reaches television studios and reaches you know the brokerages of or big rating agencies so you tend to keep that out of your budget when you know that all this will always go up as it has for the last four years if we go back and see every year that has happened so two things I would like to say here one is in the case of Narega and food subsidy you may be right that this year again they will spend more than what they've budgeted and I think but that would still be because there is popular pressure and if there is popular pressure otherwise they will not do it the only reason they'll do it like there was a lot of pressure the situation was really bad and I'm sure their feedback mechanism also told them in UP that they have free grains was helping them why would they otherwise distribute with these photographs of Modi on the bags and continued exactly to the money connections they're clearly doing it with the political agenda but they wish they have to do it which is what we see in the budget estimates this is what they would like to spend but if they pushed there are these there is Narega which is a demand based scheme there's food subsidy where they're sitting on these stocks which they don't know what to do with and they have to get rid of so these two they might spend but look at the other heads this JAL Jeevan mission which last year they made such a big fuss off and again this year but if you look at the spending up to end of December it's only 40% of what they allocated last year so till the end of the year we don't know how much they will spend if you look at the actual expenditures of Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment I think they were more or less admitted that they'll not be able to spend the 50,000 crore they said in the revised estimate I think it's 45,000 crore there and keeping a cushion for themselves which they also know they won't spend they've not been able to spend the last three years so there what this budget tells us is what their true priorities are and what their intent is in some things they might have to make some changes so you see that the budget for this as a proportion of the total budget is the lowest in 11 years this year last year lowest in 10 years this year is a little lower gender budget again the proportion going down all this to me tells me what their priorities are and prioritize these groups but they didn't that doesn't take away from the fact that this government is not prioritizing yeah I'd also want to ask you let me start with Deepa on this you know when one looks at the borrowing itself right the quality of that borrowing seems to have changed I don't know if you have if you've looked at it there seems to be a lot more coming out of the small savings small savings of public small savings than it had earlier the significant chunk is actually coming out of that is there anything that you would like to talk about on that is there anything that is red flagged there Deepa or if you are not if that is not something that you've looked at Professor Raoval does that buddy you at all I have not looked at it so all right okay I want to come to the idea of taxes right and one of the things that some people have argued is that the tax collection going up at a time when the economy has not really recovered is a sign that only those who can pay have actually earned more right so that means that the rich have got richer and at a time when the government should have given relief even on indirect taxes it did not and therefore GST collections have gone up and maybe GST collections are catching up in certain segments as well you know a lot of us tend to dismiss the middle what we call the middle classes requirements right I know Professor Raoval you talked about stimulating demand and in India demand is not a homogeneous thing as we all know that if you give it to the poor if there's more demand from the poor then it probably spend it more on food and absolute basic necessities right none of which I think corporate sector is interested in beyond the point right India's corporate sector is not interested in it and the public sector has more or less been dismantled so there's nothing that they can produce to help the poor there is a certain amount of middle class demand which used to exist especially during the you know the boom years of 2004 to 2008 when there was a credit driven or let's say market valuation driven salary boom there is no change in taxes and I know this sounds like a very middle class demand but tax labs have not kept pace with inflation so in real terms many more people are ending up in the taxable income limit even when their real income hasn't gone up at all so can you expect demand to go up from that space at all if this there is nothing given to them in terms of tax relief and here I'm not talking about the richest people I'm saying that they're at the margins maybe they don't contribute a huge amount to the total tax that the government collects but at the margins at the bottom level at the two and a half lakh per year up to that five lakh or a little more what you gave five years ago is still the same and in terms of real income it is actually it would be much lower today and I think one point I would like to make is that what is often referred to as middle classes in India by no means middle I mean a person who has a salaried job that gets you even 20,000 rupees I mean 10,000 rupees a month you are rich I mean I mean if you are in a village and you have a salary monthly fixed salary of 10,000 rupees but if I look at let's say if I look at urban India then frankly a household income of less than 25,000 is not something with which you can really buy anything that's right but that said the levels of inequality in this country are such that the proportion of households that have monthly income of 25,000 you're talking of top 20 percent I think if you look at world inequality database just the top 10 percent you're talking of a very small percent of Indian households that have that kind of incomes you see now if it comes to demand the real demand comes from that bottom 90 percent and that but what demand what can they buy I mean you see your corporate sector is also producing Parleji biscuits your corporate sector is also producing clothes banyans and underwear and towels that because the question if I look at what let's say something like Hindustan Unilever right they actually sell sashes at a loss if you look at it if you actually bought sashes of shampoo instead of a bottle you'll spend less you you'll end up spending less than buying a bottle and technically a larger volume should be cheaper but it is talking of manufacturing sector it's not just Hindustan Unilever you know and there is that huge MSME sector there is a huge set of actually larger enterprises which are not Hindustan Unilever that are producing all kinds of things and are facing a huge demand crunch you see so I think India understands this if you look at on I think it was on NDTV you had Nainal Lal Tidwai Rappasamy Fikki she asked for an expansion of Narega and an urban employment scheme saying that we need demand so the you know that's that's precisely what I'm saying that it sounds to me it sounds that these are untested arguments because what is the 100 days of work at what wages what can you buy with that I mean in NAFTA 2017 tells us that 30% of households in rural India earn less than 2,500 rupees a year a month with that what are you going to buy you can do as much Narega you want it's not going to change anything as far as corporate India or the manufacturing sector does yes that Narega wage will be used to buy hair oil shampoo soap dals, sabzi oil a school uniform maybe for the child they've not bought clothes for children for the last two years you know one needs to just add these there is an argument to be made here that they'll buy Chinese products and nothing is that made in India because it's cheaper to buy Chinese products I change these questions all I mean you go to a Shani bazaar or a you know one of the Sunday market in Delhi right you'll find everything is made in China poor people just buy that because it's cheaper do we even have capacities I think do we even have capacities to actually deliver products to people if you actually generate demand amongst the poor I don't think we have it well I mean if you are saying that there is the creation of demand that an Indian entrepreneur will not rise up to produce those goods I mean then I mean they can't repeat what I'm saying is that what would it take so let's say let me ask you Deepa if you were finance minister what would you have to do to both generate demand but also ensure that it's not demand for Chinese and Vietnamese goods see that is you need a longer term industrial policy and that long lot of people have been talking about but currently is that the context I mean there is so much excess unutilized capacity in the economy is it the problem of what capacity is in steel and cement and stuff like that there but what do we produce which is installed capacity which can be bought by poor people that is my question I mean what can you do today so as I'm saying that I have been writing for three years that oh we must spend but when I look at the structure of production manufacturing in a sector such as say think of Tirupur or something where there are textile enterprises if there is greater demand for banyans that manufacturing can happen in Tirupur I don't think it is the case that there is no there are no area there is surely need for government to strengthen provide service you know facilities so that MSME sector can expand but there is clearly a possibility for us to build strengthen demand and create opportunities whereby those entrepreneurs can produce and sell of course there is huge there is both existing capacity and huge unmet potential for government to provide basic infrastructure to MSME sector so that they can produce I mean cluster after cluster is facing a crisis okay your foundries your you know all kinds of sectors where things are produced you know machinery you know I mean we used to do field work in Punjab in combined harvest manufacturing you know these are small enterprises that actually just have bending machines and laser cutting machines and and welding machines and they manufacture agricultural implements or a village level town level agricultural implement manufacturer okay there is no demand for those implements because farmers don't have money to to buy your your 11 franc plow has broken down you don't have money to get it repaired or buy a new one now if you create demand of course there that huge amount of manufacturing happens at the local level also demand for services you know things like a mechanic normally they don't get their bike out they don't get their bike repaired the big construction boom in the up area part of it was people building their own houses because they had money to do it they will buy tile they will do their walls they do all kinds of things which people are not doing there is okay because there are supply side issues like Vikas said but that's not so big that there is no point in creating demand at all and that it will all only help the Chinese economy no I'm asking I'm asking a specific I'm asking is essentially that is creating demand that easy or does it require very targeted planning I mean is there a problem of having a budget when you've more or less dismantled the planning commission I think the question is not so creating nothing is easy in a country the size as ours but it is necessary I mean there is no way we can get out of the situation we are in today without addressing the demand issue we can't keep doing these credit side supply side initiatives credit linkages and so on without addressing the demand side we are somewhere we have hit that saturation if it's only the richest one person that is growing and then maybe the 10% a little bit how long can we go on with that we obviously can't and covid has kind of intensified things and therefore it's become even more aggressive yeah so I think the basic of the root of it is straightforward you need to spend if you spend your demand I mean it's as simple as that you know I mean where can you spend of course you can spend you've got food stocks lying you can spend as I said you can simply double NREGA employment by saying we are going to give 50% of wages in terms of grain and we are going to create double the amount of employment okay so so so effectively you're saying that if you combine spending by creating employment as you said Mandrega is one of them and there might there could be an urban version of you know you know Mahatma Gandhi urban employment all governments scheme from departments that's a huge number yes exactly yeah and that's won't be the poorest those will be all above the 10,000 rupees per month exactly yeah so and that is a huge number of vacancies and there is a huge demand for it we know that younger people actually now want government jobs no longer want private sector jobs anymore majority as the CSDS you know last survey shows so effectively there doesn't seem to be any kind of policy which actually looks at what to do whether it's whether it is employment and some of that employment as you said is not doesn't necessarily have to be just cash out it can even be if you give food then there'll be a certain amount of less spending by those people which they can spend on other things and the other is spending itself is not directed at employment either right yeah I mean I see that there is a significant increase in let's say Pradhan Mantri Gramsara Kyojna right what it and probably it'll be argued that this is going to generate employment well I don't know no you see the problem is that a lot of that spending that sort of so-called increase in capital spending that exactly what we talked about since yesterday is basically money being given for PPP projects these are going to be I mean that those 80 lakh houses that they want to build is going to be money handed out to to real estate developers you see you are not running an old style Indra Avas Yojana at all you see now what you have is a scheme under under which developers are given money to create housing which is actually beyond the reach of the poor so you are actually you know spending I mean all that road infrastructure that's going to be created will be money going in the hands of big construction companies so absolutely and and there the work is done using heavy machinery it is not employment intensive way of doing things this sort of PPP mode is not an employment creating mode at all it is money that goes into pockets you know profits of corporates real estate companies which is why whenever such schemes are now stock markets stock prices of companies which sell cranes or you know heavy machinery those shoot up because it even the markets understand that the spending is actually for such companies so these are not the you know old style spending where you know huge amount of employment will be created that's not true at all so it's effectively if you had to look at the political fallout of it and I probably this is an unfair question to ask before we end the show politically what is the fallout because this seems to be and the edge of a precipice and we don't there doesn't seem to be any way to stop what is happening right now I'll start with Deepa what will be the fallout is difficult to say because I'm going to ask you to go out on a limb stick your neck out and take a chance what is dear and I think on this now there is more and more of a consensus emerging is that there is an economic crisis that this recovery or not has I mean that the last few years the slowdown has definitely affected the poor much much more than the top richest that employment is a problem we've seen the the railway protests and we are but all of these are issues there is no doubt about it and that people are agitated with about it also there is no doubt but will that convert into voting against the present government that is something that needs to be seen and that I think has to do also with how much the opposition is able to take forward these messages are the politics like you said how does the people in the person in the village know what's going on in the budget how does the person in the village also know that we have to thank Modi for our vaccine it's because somebody is taking this campaign yeah the people and as long as the media plays the role of taking that message forward the government always has an advantage yeah so one can hope that all these opportunities that are created for the opposition in our country with covid with unemployment with demonetization and so on that the message is really taken to people and then maybe there will be political changes as a rival the point is that the opposition probably believes in exactly the same economic policies so it's almost I mean most of the main opposition parties don't seem to have the problem with the policies themselves or the main thrust of the policies they tend to nitpick when they're in the opposition I saw Mr. Chirambaram yesterday talking about Mandrega and how Mandrega allocation has been reduced and he seems to have forgotten his fight with Jairam Ramesh over Mandrega how he said that Mandrega is actually bad for agriculture so the opposition doesn't seem to have it seems like that this government can change but as far as economic policies go it'll be more or less of the more of the same thing well I don't know I mean that depends on on what happens and and I don't think one should rule out the possibility that there can be a change for the better I mean there can be I mean I don't think I'm willing to rule out the possibility that there can be change for the betterment of people there can be change but which is which is progressive how will that come about there are I mean one has to see now would it mean that that more progressive political political forces will have greater influence let's hope so would it mean that political forces that were conservative in the past would learn their lessons maybe so I mean I don't think we should rule out any possibility we have to do what we can to do orbit in that direction but I mean I don't think we can be completely pessimistic that possibilities of a progressive change don't exist and cannot happen that's not the case all right on that I said Akhilesh has talked about bringing back pensions so there is all kinds of things going on we don't know what will happen all right on that optimistic note and also hopefully that I mean I don't expect anyone in the government to be watching this show but hopefully wherever you're speaking elsewhere it reaches those who are making policies and at least these few things that you're talking about which is distributing the food that's lying there it's strengthening Asha you know Anganwadi giving more food to children these things reach not just from us but from everyone who's talking about it because one gets set once politics aside ultimately it's the people who need to get something immediately thanks a lot for joining us and thank you for joining us on newsclick keep watching newsclick this is our coverage of the budget 2022 do subscribe to us and click that like button as well and share this video as well